Girl Geek Dinners Ottawa

*I could have sworn I had posted this early! Alas, it’s been sitting in the draft folder, but like they say, better late than never! -Kelly

First off, on behalf of Mel, Veronica and myself, I’d like to say a huge thank you to all the geeky girls who came out on Monday. We were a fantastic crowd and we got a ton of great feedback on how we should proceed. Please feel free to keep suggestions coming via comments on this post–I’m going to recap what we talked about.

Possible Topics

Some topics you indicated you’d be interested in learning more about:

• Social media
• Semantic Web
• Web 2.0 or Web 3.0
• Digital marketing
• Workshops – setting up a WP blog, registering a domain
• Open source
• Legal and Copyright issues in an open web
• Entrepreneurship
• Case studies
  
• Measuring quality of programs
• ROI, monitoring
• Demo of Beta tools, focus testing
• Career development
• Managing your personal brand
• Using SM tools to collaborate internally
• Women issues in the workplace
• Networking and meetups (i.e “speed networking”, interactive networking games)

The preferred frequency of events is once per month, but avoiding summer, winter break, March break, etc. As for structure, many liked the format we went with (eat first, and present afterwards) and are fine with the start time of 7 p.m. Locations – not always downtown, but ensure accessible parking and public transit.

As for cost/fees, the preference is to pay your own dinner and a small fee upfront to secure your spot. In some instances it would be alright to pay for dinner in advance (when a restaurants wants a deposit or prix fixe menu) but not the norm.

Mentorship

There was a strong interest in initiating a mentorship program. We will create a mentorship section on this web site and create a process for pairing up experienced professionals with students/starting professionals.

That’s it in a nutshell. Please leave a comment if there’s anything else you’re interested in addressing. Oh and remember the hashtag for Girl Geek Dinners Ottawa is #ggdottawa. Use it on Twitter, blog posts, photos from events etc.

That’s all and we are *really* excited to see you when we officially kick things off in September!